I’ve been playing PCB lately to try to hit some goals since that’s the one game I’m fairly decent at. I managed to clear Phantasm with all three characters (SakuyaA, ReimuB, MarisaA) and score 500M on Normal, Hard, Extra, and Phantasm (using ReimuB on Normal and Extra, SakuyaA on Hard and Phantasm). I’d like to try to go back and push my Normal score a bit higher now that I’ve gotten used to playing Hard, and there’s still a few spell cards I’d like to capture. I still need one on Extra, two on Hard, and three on Phantasm. Yukari’s “Double Black Death Butterfly” and “Boundary of Humans and Youkai” are beyond me, so I’m not really worried about those, but I might still be able to get “Danmaku Bounded Field” with more practice.
EDIT: I was using MarisaA on Extra to try to capture “Unilateral Contract”, and even though I still haven’t got it, I managed a good Extra run without meaning to. Now somehow Marisa has my high score in the game with 581M even though she’s still the hardest for me to clear anything with.
Nice! It looks like that Marisa run was a bit tight, but any clear is quite impressive as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve been playing some Shoot the Bullet when I rage over Mountain of Faith and the more I play the more I love Aya. (Even if she’s cruel in Mountain of Faith.)
I’m curious in Mountain of Faith what do the green stars do other then score (If they do anything more) I’ve never really questioned them before but I want to know if they’re worth going out of my way to collect.
The Marisa Phantasm clear was really tight. I went into “Danmaku Bounded Field” needing to dodge at least two of the five waves, and the second one was the only one I had managed to dodge before that. I managed to dodge the first one for the first time as well, though, and almost got through the third too.
I haven’t played Shoot the Bullet in a while since I installed it on the Windows partition of my Mac instead of my Windows laptop or the Mac partition like the rest of the games I have, so I’d have to reboot the computer to play it. I got stuck on Meiling because I’m bad at unfocused movement, especially with Aya’s speed. That game is part of why Aya is my favourite, though.
The green star items in MoF increase your faith meter (the meter in the bottom left), which determines the value of the point items. So they are critical for scoring, probably moreso than actually collecting point items a lot of the time. Since extra lives are earned by reaching score benchmarks, it is kind of important to score decently, so I would try to get them if you can. I think the last extra life is at 150M, so for survival purposes, you’d typically want to score at least that high. Beyond that, I don’t think there is any purpose to them other than score.
Getting to 150M by the end of stage 6 isn’t that bad if you learn the scoring system, but it’s almost impossible without doing so. The key is keeping your faith meter up. It is constantly dropping unless you collect items or damage enemies. You really have to try to chain your item collection, especially during lulls between enemies, to keep the faith meter from going down. (Collecting any item keeps the faith value from dropping, only the green ones actually increase the value.)
Oh I know the pains of dual booting, overall it’s nice but it’s a pain having to move/access things between partitions. One of these days I’d like to get a third drive to archive all my media on, but alas it will take more funds then I have at my disposal.
I think what’s fun about Shoot the Bullet is that it’s not much of a commitment since you only play one stage at a time. It’s still a challenge but you can set it down and pick it up where you left off.
Thanks! I noticed the faith meter but really didn’t notice anything other then that it didn’t drain when I got items.
I like the same thing about Shoot the Bullet. It also has a good variety of difficulty, so even though it is much harder to complete than the main games, you can still play through the early stuff and feel accomplished, because every spell is its own thing. I also like the photography aspect. It’s a nice change of pace from the typical shmup format.
Mountain of Faith was the first game I actually learned the scoring system for since it’s important for getting lives. I didn’t even know the cherry value in PCB determined the point item value until recently (basically when I started trying to break 500M).
“Danmaku Bounded Field” ended up not being that bad once you know where the openings are. It is very much about learning where the openings are and when you can get through them, and then going through them confidently (if you hesitate, it is easy to get trapped), so it takes some practice. The main difficulty is that you have to get good enough at Phantasm to get to it consistently, and it takes a while to play through the whole stage to practice it once. There are still some tricky parts, but other than being hard to practice, it’s more doable than some of her other cards.
Yeah I’d love to see Touhou make it’s way to Steam. It’d really open ZUN’s market up to a lot of people that would of otherwise have no good way to get Touhou.
I love that Nichijou/Touhou crossover, pretty much all of the characters seemed spot on.
I’d been taking a bit of a break from Touhou for a while but when I came back to it I was pleasantly surprised that my performance had improved rather then declined. Seems sort of funny that you can pick up skills that play into Touhou even out of things that are nothing like Touhou.
It is kind of weird how you can improve your skills without actually playing the game, or how skills can cross over from different types of games. On the other hand, I sometimes get pretty much the opposite phenomenon as well, where I’ll play one Touhou game a lot and then expect the improvement to carry over to other Touhou games, only to find that it doesn’t help nearly as much as I’d hoped. You still have to learn each game’s patterns and quirks, so in some ways you are back to square one when you go between games, although with higher general skills. I’ve been playing so much PCB lately that I’m a little afraid to go back to any of the others now, just because I know it’s going to be frustrating to go from playing Hard/Lunatic and being pretty consistent on Extra to struggling with Normal again.
Speaking of playing Lunatic, I know I said the other day I was still a ways off from a clear, but it turned out to be closer than I thought. I guess I just wasn’t bombing enough before (hooray for Sakuya’s four bombs per life). I started with 5 lives, but in the end I had enough left that I could have cleared with the default 3.
That’s quite the run there. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a lot of ground to cover before I start making Lunatic runs but I may try a few Lunatic runs in EotSD just for fun.
I’ve been sticking mostly Mountain of Faith and made some good progress. I got through stage 4 without dying at all but still couldn’t clear stage 6. I wish I could practice that last spell card, I think it’d really help.
Also, you can sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” to part of Aya’s theme from Mountain of Faith. So playing that game is like being wished a Merry Christmas from ZUN himself:
Finally got it done. (Sort of washed out photo =/ )
Pretty pleased with how it went together. The only thing I need is to weigh the stand so it stays up better.
That was really good. I can’t even imagine how much work something like that would take to make, but I’m glad someone took the time. http://i.imgur.com/V8jQSWb.jpg
Artist:nanobe
The Japanese wiki’s annual popularity poll is up. It’s in Japanese, but you can use this guide to vote if you want. I voted for Aya, Chen, Marisa, Nitori, and Shinki, and I felt pretty bad about leaving off Yuyuko. I haven’t voted for the music yet since I can’t decide on a 7th song, but I’ll probably vote for:
Border of Life (Yuyuko)
Lullaby of Deserted He** (SA Stage 5)
Maiden’s Capriccio (Reimu)
Love-Colored Magic/Master Spark (Marisa)
Legendary Illusion ~ Infinite Being (Shinki)
Flowering Night (Sakuya, SWR version)
Reading Marisa’s dialogue/endings makes me miss playing her since I am way better with Reimu (and usually other non-Marisa characters) in everything but EoSD and the fighting games.
I ended up going with the SWR arrangement of “Mystic Oriental Love Consultation” (Reimu) for my seventh song.
I think the poll closes March 1, so there’s not a whole lot of time left if you want to do the rest.
I’ve always liked Mokou’s character design. I’ve been playing her a bit lately because I was unlocking all the Last Word spells, and you have to beat her with three different teams for one of them. The Border team was done long ago, and the Ghost team is not that different since Yuyuko’s spread works about as well as the Border team’s homing. I can’t get used to the Scarlet team, though (even after playing MarisaC on MoF, who has a similar-ish gimmick to Remilia), and the Magic team’s complete lack of spread was hard for me to use. And the solo characters are a fun challenge, but the game is not really designed for them, so they’re all harder than the teams, I think. I ended up clearing with the Magic team by going to her final spell with no resources and then capturing it (which I usually don’t do).
I never thought much about Mystia when I first played IN, but I think her punk band is pretty cool, and this doujinshi is adorable.
